Solana (SOL) has become one of the best performers recently and has made significant gains over the past year. A big part of this rise is using memecoins in the Solana group.
According to crypto analyst Crypto Rand, investors are becoming increasingly interested in Solana, sometimes even more than Ethereum. This trend shows a major shift in investors’ attitudes, making Solana more important in the crypto world.
According to CoinMarketCap, Solana-based memecoins performed much better than Ethereum-based memecoins in the first half of 2024. They performed almost 800% better year-to-date (YTD) than Ethereum-based memecoins.
Solana’s Rise In The Cryptocurrency Market
In October 2023, the price of SOL, SOL’s native token, and the ecosystem as a whole, including its memecoin projects, both went up significantly. With this much support, SOL has risen to the top of the cryptocurrency market, making it a strong rival to Ethereum.
Even though Ethereum is still the market leader, Solana’s fast growth shows that it could seriously threaten Ethereum.SOL’s network activity went through the roof in the second quarter of 2024. Over $26 million was made in transaction fees and sales, a 42-fold rise from the previous year.
The total SOL trade volume reached an impressive $292 billion, almost seven times higher than the same time in 2023. This shows how the SOL ecosystem is growing. An in-depth look at network data shows over 15.3 billion transactions in Q2 2024.
These transactions included voting and non-voting activities, showing that the network was used much more. This year, the total value locked (TVL) within SOL’s DeFi algorithms increased tenfold, reaching $3.4 billion. This rise shows how popular SOL is becoming for decentralized banking uses.
There were also significant shifts in the NFT business on Solana. More than 98 million new NFTs were made in Q2 2024, which is 54 times more than the same time last year. In other words, this means that the NFT setting in the network is still alive and well. Additionally, USDC reached a market capitalization of $2.15 billion on SOL, around 70% of the total market capitalization for stablecoins on the platform.